GEORGE BENTHAM. 529 



account from which most of these biographical details are drawn, 

 and which were taken from Mr. Bentham's own memoranda : " The 

 cortege consisted of a two-horse coach fitted up as a sleeping apart- 

 ment; a long, low, two-wheeled, one-horse spring van for General 

 and Mrs. Bentham, furnished with a library and piano ; and another, 

 also furnished, for his daughters and their governess. The plan fol- 

 lowed was to travel by day from one place of interest to another, 

 bivouacking at night by the road, or in the garden of a friend, or in 

 the precincts of the prefectures, to which latter he had credentials 

 from the authorities in the capital. In this way he visited Orleans, 

 Tours, Angouleme, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Montpellier, and finally Mon- 

 tauban, where a lengthened stay was made in a country house hired 

 for the purpose. From Montauban (the cortege having broken down 

 in some way) they proceeded still by private conveyances to Car- 

 cassonne, Narbonue, Nimes, Tarascon, Marseilles, Toulon, liyeres." * 



It was in the early part of this tour that young Bentham's atten- 

 tion was first turned to botany. Happening to take up DeCandolle's 

 edition of Lamarck's Flore Frangaise, which his mother, who was 

 fond of the subject, had just purchased, he was struck with the 

 methodical analytical tables, and he proceeded immediately to apply 

 them to the first plant he could lay hold of. " His success led him 

 to pursue the diversion of naming every plant he met with." During 

 his long stay at Montauban he entered as a student in the Protestant 

 theological school of that town, pursuing " with ardor the courses of 

 mathematics, Hebrew, and comparative philology, the last a favorite 

 study in after life," and at home giving himself to music, in which 

 he was remarkably gifted, to Spanish, to botany, and, with great 

 relish, to society. Soon after, the family was established upon a 

 property of two thousand acres, purchased by his father in the vicinity 

 of Montpellier. Here he resumed the intimacy of his boyhood with 

 John Stuart IMill, who was five years his junior, and whose life-long 

 taste for botany was probably fixed during this residence of seven 

 or eight mouths in the Bentham family in the year 1820. About 

 this time Bentham occupied himself with ornithology, and then with 

 entomology, finding time, however, for another line of study ; for at 

 the age of twenty he had begun a translation into French of his Uncle 

 Jeremy's Chrestomathia, which was published in Paris some years 

 afterwai'ds, and he soon after translated also the essay on Nomencla- 

 ture and Classification. This was followed by his own " Essai sur la 



* An article in Nature, October 2, 1884, by Sir Joseph Dawson Hooker. 

 VOL. XX. (n. s. XII.) 34 



